The field of this invention is the identification of remote objects, often moving objects. In the past, this has been accomplished by the transmission of an r-f signal to a remote tag. The tag contains the electronic identity of the object, or other information. The tag is a powered antenna which serves to modulate and reflects the transmitted beam. The reflected modulated beam is received at the transmitter where the information from the tag is decoded. Systems of this type are described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,075,632 and Copending U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 885,248, filed July 14,1986, (now U.S. Pat. No. 4,739,328) and 135,048 filed Dec. 18, 1987, all assigned to the same assignee as his invention.
In the past there have been two kinds of tags: one is battery powered and the other is powered by the transmitted beam. Battery powered tags have the disadvantage of required periodic battery or tag replacement. Moreover, occasionally a battery will be come inoperative much earlier than normal, leaving the remote object with no means of being identified.
U.S. standard frequency for transmitted microwave signals for industrial, scientific and medical uses (ISM), the one used for remote object identification require, is a center frequency of 915 MHz. At this frequency, it has been possible to develop a tag powered by the beam alone without a battery. However, various other countries, such as Japan and France, legislate an ISM microwave center frequency much higher, above 2000 MHz. In Japan and France, the ISM standard is 2450 MHz. For reasons which will be explained, it has been impossible to develop an antenna at that frequency capable of a reasonable transmission range, in excess of 1 meter, which does not require battery power.
Without battery power, the antenna must collect its transmission energy solely from the transmitted signal, thus obtaining sufficient output power to run the modulator circuit. The modulator circuit modulates the antenna backscatter cross-section and reflects the resultant signal to the transmitter in order to communicate the circuit's unique identification code (a digitally stored number).
The maximum power available at the antenna is governed by two factors. The power is equal to the effective aperture (A) of the antenna multiplied by the power density incident on antenna in watts per square meter. The size of the effective aperture A is inversely proportional to the square of the frequency of the transmitted microwave signal. Thus, the higher the transmitted frequency, the smaller the aperture. However, the transmitted frequency, as discussed earlier, is fixed by regulation. The frequency may not vary significantly from a prescribed value of 2450 MHz in Japan and France or 915 MHz in the United States. Moreover, in Japan, the maximum transmitted power is only 0.3 watts in comparison to a power in excess of 2 watts in the United States. For both of these reasons, the available power at the antenna in Japan or France is greatly reduced from that available in the United States.
As an additional complication, as the transmitted frequency gets higher, the parasitics of the antenna circuit elements in the antenna become much more critical. The choice of microwave diode is very critical. Tuning the circuit also becomes more difficult.
As a result, for use in countries employing the high frequency standard, tags have required batteries to provide sufficient power to achieve the desired minimum transmission ranges of at least 2 meters.
The possibility has been considered of using a phased array of multiple antennas to increase the gain, and thus the effective aperture and the output power. However, phased arrays are undesireable in many applications because they make the antenna too directional.
Folded dipole antennas were also considered, but they were thought to be inadequate because the impedance of a folded dipole antenna would be too high compared with the parasitic impedances of the microwave diodes used for conversion of r-f to d.c. The parasitic impedance of the microwave diode forms a voltage divider with the antenna impedance, and that divides the power and reduces the power delivered to the output. Such folded dipole antennas have previously been used at microwave frequencies (2450 MHz) for checking stray, undesirable transmission from microwave ovens. However, such a checker is located only a few inches from the source of microwave energy and the transmission levels sought to be detected thus were relatively high, on the order of 5 milliwatts per square centimeter. Therefore the antenna parasitics were not at all critical. The available power at such a short range was adequate even if substantial power were lost as a result of the parasitics.
In the present invention, the beam power used to power the antenna is very low, more than two orders of magnitude less that the power outside of any microwave oven which even marginally exceeds regulation (the ones which require the generation of an output "danger" signal from the antenna). Therefore, what is required is a low antenna impedance and a high diode parasitic impedance, thereby maximizing the voltage across the diode and thus the output power. Accordingly, folded dipole antennas were ruled out.